Chapter 21

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

E very instinct told him to turn around. For once, he and his magic agreed. They both wanted to be with Rose as the mist swirled around their feet. One look at Carter made it clear that was not an option. Carter needed to get out of there—fast. He had no wind-born weapon to help protect him against Zrak’s agents. Luc’s concerns didn’t seem high on Carter’s priority list as he stood frozen next to him. Carter wasn’t looking at the ground where the mist started to build. Instead, his gaze was fixed to the treetops, darting from branch to branch.

“Why are they gathering?” Carter mumbled to himself.

“What—” Luc started but changed his mind. They had already taken too long. Luc couldn’t wait for Carter to pull it together. He grabbed for his earth magic. Its response was immediate, even though both he and his magic would rather be elsewhere. A burst of power swept Carter off his feet and floated him above the ground, similar to how Luc usually played with his nephews. He tugged on his magic until it moved Carter away from the mist.

“What the—” Carter shouted. Now that he was floating above the ground, Carter regained focus. He thrashed like a cat in water as he tried to right himself to stand on two feet. His gaze, though, still lingered on the treetops as he struggled. Luc decided he was still too unfocused to be trusted. The thousand-yard stare, aimed at whatever he saw up there, distracted him from saving himself.

“Don’t fight it,” Luc said. “I’ll let you down when we’re clear of the mist.”

“I. Am. The. Vesten. Point.” Carter continued to struggle. “You will treat me with respect.”

“I respect you enough to save your life. You wouldn’t have made it away from the mist alone.” He glanced back at the Vesten Point as he jogged ahead. “What were you staring at? You mumbled something about gathering?”

Carter’s gaze met Luc’s and widened as panic set in again. “What did you see?”

“Now you sound like Rose,” Luc murmured as he wiped his hand down his face. Before sharing with him the nature of her dual magic lines, Rose had always been worried he saw something about her magic that would give her away. It made him wonder what magic Carter was hiding. Rose had better be okay. He knew she could take care of herself, but who knew if her weapons were a guaranteed solution against the mist. They’d worked so far to fight against the Nebulus, but what if one got around her blade? Depending on how many of Zrak’s agents came with this particular mist attack, Rose and Juliette could be outnumbered.

He couldn’t think of that now. “I didn’t see anything other than you staring upward.” He’d get Carter far enough away to be safe and then return to Rose. “What were you looking at?” he tried again. He might as well attempt to learn something from this unexpected one-on-one time with the Vesten Point.

“Nothing.” Carter’s eyes darted around even more than usual.

Luc laughed. “No one is buying that answer. I need to get you outside the mist radius. You have time to explain why you froze.”

“I didn’t freeze.” Carter crossed his arms petulantly over his chest as he lay horizontally in the air, Luc continuing to tug him along.

“You’re not fooling anyone. But I suppose you can keep your secret if it helps you.” He looked back at Carter as he jogged through the trees.

“Thank you, Luc.”

Thank you for what? Leaving him alone? For not bugging him about whatever he was hiding? It was no problem for him. He was used to the fae courts keeping secrets from each other. It was Rose who was the idealist. It was a unique feeling to realize that he had begun to embody the energy she was trying to spread among them. Her ideas were contagious like that. They spoke of a world he wanted to be a part of—with her.

Now, he worried that his power’s similarity to Aterra’s might take that future from him. Would Rose’s support of him dampen her ability to align with the others? He saw the way Juliette looked at him. No matter the strides they made sitting around the campfire in the evenings, he knew she didn’t trust him, and she wondered why Rose did. He would keep trying as long as it took, though. He was thankful for every damn day with Rose—even in the middle of this mess.

“Luc.” Carter’s voice broke into his thoughts. Panic tinged the edges of his call.

“Yes.” Luc risked a glance behind him as he continued to jog. The mist was following them.

“Let me down. I think we need to move a bit faster.” Carter’s head was tilted back as he watched the mist catch up to them. Luc noted his gaze still darted between the mist hanging on the ground and something higher up. “No, a lot faster.”

Shit. Luc’s magic dropped Carter, and they both took off in a sprint. They put distance between themselves and the dark mist threatening to envelop them. Carter, more familiar with running through the trees, kept turning his head and calling out their progress.

“We’ve got some good distance now. Wait—it looks like it’s retreating.” He paused, slowing down, and mumbling to himself. “Why are more coming?”

Luc stopped and turned. Carter was right. The mist wasn’t just retreating—it seemed to dissipate, just as it had whenever he and Rose cleared an area of Nebulus in their past battles. He scratched his head as he tried to imagine what was happening. He let out a breath as he concluded Rose and Juliette must have won their battle. He gestured to Carter as he went to investigate. “Stay there,” he directed.

“Wait—” Carter called.

Luc paused mid-step and turned to face Carter. The Vesten Point’s gaze was roaming all around them as if there was an audience that only he could see. His gaze wandered similarly to the way it had around the hole Luc had created in Loch. “Carter…”

Carter’s head tilted. “Okay, you can go check.”

Luc shook his head. Maybe he’d been spending too much time on the road with the Vesten Point. Especially if he was noticing this much about him. Moving back through the haphazard trail he’d just cut through the trees, Luc saw no sign of the mist. “Carter, I think you can join me.”

Carter was beside him in no time. “What happened?”

“Rose and Juliette must have held off the Nebulus.”

“Hmm.”

Luc started to walk back. Carter put his hand on his arm, turning Luc to face him. “Thank you for taking control of the situation back there. You were right. I did freeze.”

“No problem. We’re on the same team.”

“You are the last I’d expected to hear say that.”

Luc met Carter’s eyes. “Whatever Aiden, or Aterra, had on you…I’m sure it wasn’t an easy decision. We all have our limits. I suspect Aterra found yours.”

Carter nodded.

“Don’t beat yourself up too much for it. A literal god was blackmailing you.”

“You sound so casual about it, Luc,” Carter said as they started walking again. He seemed eager to continue the conversation but not to have to look at Luc while they had it. Luc shrugged and met Carter’s pace.

“You’re not the one I’m mad at.”

“What, you’re mad at Aterra?”

“Well…yeah,” Luc said. He paused. If he wanted Carter to be honest with him, he might as well take Rose’s tactic and try it himself. “But I’m also mad at myself.”

Carter’s head turned toward Luc as he kept walking. “Why is that?”

Luc sighed. “I told myself that everyone was just looking for someone to blame, and I was an easy target when they talked about how the mist plague wasn’t attacking Aterra’s villages. I never thought that it could be a real pointer to the problem we were facing. I’m angry that I couldn’t do more to protect the taken villages. I’m angry I tried to scare someone I thought was a village shop girl into putting me in contact with a magical weapon master as my one path to success.”

“You lost me there.”

“It’s a long story, but suffice it to say, I was flailing in trying to figure out what was happening on the continent. I was desperately working to save those who fear me and blame me… And maybe they’re not even that wrong.”

This territory was way too vulnerable for Luc’s comfort. He was the one who couldn’t look at Carter now as he said these words. They weren’t exactly secrets. The secret was that Luc acknowledged them. He thought about them, even when he gave the appearance of shrugging them all off. Rose was the only person who seemed to realize that they might bother him. It was one of the many reasons he—his magic flared in his chest as he stumbled over the thought. He grabbed his shirt, trying to make room for him to breathe. He hadn’t fully acknowledged his feelings yet, but his magic was aggressively on board.

Carter didn’t seem to notice as he charged on in the conversation. “I can see spirits,” Carter blurted out. “Especially those at the threshold of the veil.”

Thoughts about his feelings for Rose left his mind as he turned to face Carter. They both stopped in their tracks. “Come again?” The threshold of the veil? As in, those about to go beyond the veil? Were they talking about seeing the afterlife?

“You heard me,” Carter said, then he reiterated. “I can see spirits. It’s an incredibly rare gift in the Vesten court—connected with a shifter form that’s all but extinct. We only have a record of one or two others with the power, and no one else alive can take the form. Aterra knew, and that’s what Aiden held over me.”

Luc shook his head, trying to collect his thoughts. “That’s unexpected. Though your conversations with Rose make a bit more sense.” Then he added, “Why is it such a bad thing if others know?”

Carter gave him a look that said he already knew the answer. “Yes, I think Rose is close to understanding, though I’ll just tell her now that I’ve told you. But besides the perils you are all too familiar with regarding uncanny demonstrations of power, the more pertinent issue has to do with the form I take. If certain entities knew about it—my life would be in danger. Even more so now with the extra power from the Vesten artifact.”

“I see.” Luc wanted desperately to pry into the shifter form Carter took, but he sensed the Vesten Point didn’t want to share more on that topic. He pursued a different line of questioning. “You see spirits around the mist, then?” Luc paused. “There were spirits in the woods as the mist appeared?”

Carter nodded. “The mist tends to carry spirits everywhere I’ve seen it. I don’t know enough to understand if they’re victims of the mist plague or…something else.” Carter’s words were careful.

“You think those impacted by the mist are dead?” Luc asked. He thought of Tara’s body when they’d found her in Bury. Her breath had still risen and fallen in her chest. She couldn’t be dead. Maybe this was another reason it was good Carter’s ability wasn’t widely known.

“I’m not sure,” he said honestly. “Spirits can be disassociated from a body, but the person may not be dead. Existence is much more than the binary of life and death. I don’t think we’ll know for sure until we rid the continent of the mist.” He shrugged. “This was weird, though. Here, more spirits arrived as the mist dissipated. It’s why I asked you to wait. I’ve never seen that before,” Carter said as they finally broke through the tree line. “They seemed harmless, but they flooded in from beyond the veil somehow with that mist—maybe with the Nebulus?”

That didn’t make sense. Rose and Juliette should have been fighting the Nebulus as soon as he and Carter started running. He wondered at Carter’s comment but lost his train of thought as he let out a deep breath—Rose was in his sights again. His power pushed against him to get to her.

Carter reached for his arm before he could rush forward. “There’s something else you should know.”

Luc turned back to Carter, his face much more concerned than it had been in the forest. “What?”

“The hole in Loch? Spirits gathered there too.”

Luc reeled. Of course. That’s what Carter had been looking at.

“I can’t determine if they were passing beyond the veil there—I don’t think they were—but spirits were gathered there at least thinking it was a place they could pass through.”

Luc nodded. “Thanks for telling me, Carter.” He shook his head as he refocused on Rose. She was safe. Now, he smiled wryly, thinking about her motto for this trip. Treat the Compass Points as you want to interact with them in the future, not the past you’ve experienced. Halfheartedly, he rolled his eyes as he thought how unbearable she would be when he told her she had been right.